"When I pick up my guitar / This is the song that always comes / Don't know what I'm singing 'bout and / Don't know what for."
-- Ryan Adams, "Rosebud."
"Self-deprecation" is a criticism rarely if ever lobbied against Ryan Adams, and it would likely work in his favor were the opening lines of "Rosebud," tucked away unassumingly as the third track on disc two of his Cold Roses double album, meant even partially in jest. They aren't, of course, and if they're to be read as autocritique, then they're the self-evident punchline to a joke that Adams has never been in on. "Rosebud" and nearly all of the seventeen other tracks on Cold Roses are yet another round of variations of the same songs Ryan Adams has been writing ad nauseum for the past five years.
Adams apparently takes Guided By Voices' Robert Pollard's output as some sort of personal challenge. Since the summer of 2000, Adams has released his ambitious but deeply flawed solo debut, Heartbreaker; the sprawling and third-greatGold, which included a four-song "bonus" disc; Pneumonia, the final proper release from his alt-country band, Whiskeytown, which is also the best start-to-finish album he'd released this millennium; the underwhelming cast-offs compilation, Demolition; the "love me, anyone?" posturing of the aptly-titled Rock N Roll; and the protracted whine and contemptible marketing stunt of the Love is Hell EPs and full-length album. Then there's his "punk" side project, We Are F*ck You, and their album, The Finger; the song-for-song cover of The Strokes' Is This It he recorded for funsies; the songs he wrote and recorded with Beth Orton; the album he produced for sound-alike Jesse Malin; his appearances on a half-dozen tribute albums; and at the asymptote, Adams approaches infinity.
Lest anyone accuse him of slacking off, Cold Roses is but the first of three studio albums he has slated for release in 2005, with 29 and Jacksonville both due in the early autumn.
Certainly there's something admirable in Adams' work ethic and in his desire to keep new material on the market. But Adams can't keep himself out of trouble. For one thing, his artistic persona is characterized by, even founded upon its inconsistencies-- he began as the frontman for an exceptional alt-country band, won accolades from pop royalty for his songwriting on Gold, then made a bald-faced effort to position himself as an arena-rock superstar on Rock N Roll. And, within each of these distinct identities, he's shown brief flashes of brilliance upon which he's never attempted to expand or to capitalize. It's no wonder that Adams is a favorite of the hipster demographic: he conducts himself like the directionless graduate of a posh liberal arts college. What, pray tell, do you plan on doing with your B.A. in Philosophy, Mr. Adams? Deciding what he wants to be when he grows up-- Hank Williams? Neil Young? Bono?-- would do Adams a world of good, and it would make him far less insufferable an artist.
A far greater concern in Adams' music, however, is that he's a p!ss-poor judge of the relative quality of his own work. At this point in his career, it's actually less problematic that he changes his genre-of-choice between albums than it is that he's not developed an internal editor. He's bragged frequently that he writes many of his songs on bar napkins in under three minutes. When the finished product sounds like something a drunk composed while his friends stepped outside to smoke, he should start to wonder who, exactly, is supposed to be impressed by that line of braggadocio. And if he's incapable of learning the discipline of simple editing, he needs to surround himself with a band and with production teams who are willing to help him refine his final track listings.
That Cold Roses is credited to Ryan Adams & The Cardinals suggests that he may be heading in the right direction. That Cold Roses is a double-album of eighteen tracks-- again, with two more albums in the pipeline-- should give anyone who's ever heard Adams sing a line like, "I'm as calm as a fruit stand in New York / And maybe as strange," significant pause. Even from the first listen, however, it's clear that what Adams has spread over the two discs of Cold Roses is perhaps the most consistently solid permutation of the songs that always come when he picks up his guitar that he's released post-Whiskeytown.
Stylistically, Cold Roses plays like the proper follow-up to the appealing granola-rock of Gold, due in large part to the tight, technically proficient work of The Cardinals, Adams' most recent touring band. Producer Tom Schick gives the band ample breathing room, so Adams' ego doesn't run the show, and they fully earn their place in the byline. For Adams' part, he emotes to within an inch of his life, sometimes conveying a compelling urgency and sometimes coming off as hysterical in the Victorian sense. Which is to say that he puts on a good show, and his disaffected, lovelorn schtick is more convincing than is his rhymin'-on-the-top-of-a-cop-car rawk-star remove.
As for the songwriting, that the members of The Cardinals are credited as Adams' co-writers also suggests that it's to their credit that the songs on Cold Roses are the most structurally sophisticated and interesting work that Adams has yet recorded. "Meadowlake Street," for instance, begins as the type of folk-rock ballad that Adams exhausted on Love is Hell, but the song emerges as a lengthy crescendo, building to a final refrain of a well-composed rhetorical question, "If loving you's a dream that's not worth having / Then why do I dream of you?" Elsewhere, "Cherry Lane," which laments an inability to get close to its subject, stutters and starts arrhythmically before resolving into a comfortable shuffle as Adams pines, "I wanna be the one / Who walks you home tonight."
On the more midtempo-heavy disc one, the most significant change in Adams' songwriting is that he hasn't reserved his best hooks and offhand images exclusively for the radio singles. Opener "Magnolia Mountain" is simply an exceptional piece of songwriting. Adams has rarely offered something as genuinely poetic as, "I want to be the bluebird singing / Singing to the roses in the yard/ The roses in the yard her father grew for her / But it's been raining that Tennessee honey so long / I got too heavy to fly / But ain't no bluebird ever get too heavy to sing," anywhere, let alone as a second stanza. And, while he's written plenty of songs like "Sweet Illusions" that mine "you're too good for the likes of me" territory, he's not been so succinct as a chorus of, "Cause it's almost over, and it's almost gone / And I can feel that sweet illusion coming down / And I ain't got nothing but love for you now." I'd become increasingly convinced that the jaw-dropping couplet he wrote for "New York, New York" was a fluke, but Adams is really in fine form for much of Cold Roses.
Disc two contains the album's most obvious singles, including the rollicking, CCR-like "Let it Ride" and "Easy Plateau," which finds Adams still milking his Paul Westerberg fetish after Rock N Roll's excellent "So Alive" took that to its logical endpoint. And "Life is Beautiful" opens with, "You plant a rose / And if the rose comes up / You're thankful to God / And when it doesn't you cuss him," illustrating that Adams' sense of humor hasn't been entirely superceded by his sense of self-importance. Which is possibly the most pleasant surprise Cold Roses offers.
There are problems, of course. "Dance All Night" is, melodically, almost identical to Gold's "Firecracker"-- which was already cribbed heavily from Neil Young, so it's now on its third spin cycle-- and contains the exact same harmonica riff. Having already proven adept at shamelessly masturbating his influences, then, Adams has moved on to the tawdry world of webcam autofellatio. Again, one wonders who he's trying to impress sometimes. And, hanging over the whole of Cold Roses is the feeling that the album could've been pared down to a single twelve-song album, rather than the nine songs apiece doubleheader. Four of the nine tracks on disc two ("Rosebud," "Cold Roses," "Blossom," and "Life is Beautiful"), for instance, rely heavily on flower imagery; the entire album is billed as Cold Roses, sure, but that imagery isn't carried over to disc one, so the result isn't thematic coherence, it's internal redundancy. The same can be said for the vacated houses trope of disc one's "Meadowlake Street," "When Will You Come Back Home," "Cherry Lane," and "Now That You're Gone." None of these songs are particularly weak efforts-- especially given some of the garbage Adams has spewed on some of his other releases-- but there are only so many times that the same point can be made. For better or worse, Cold Roses reiterates both the pros and cons of Adams' career arc.
Still, Cold Roses is the first release of Adams' "solo" career wherein the pros decisively outweigh the cons. If in need of selective editing, the album is split into two discs so that it never becomes an overwhelming listen. If Adams' falsetto sometimes makes Conor Oberst sound as hostile and aggressive as Fred Durst, it's balanced by some first-rate musicianship-- the steel guitar on "Cherry Lane" is a highlight-- from The Cardinals. If primarily eighteen new versions of the same song he's already written at least four or five hundred times by now, his writing more often than not reminds why the best variations of that song have led folks like Elton John to jump on Adams' bandwagon.
Ryan Adams' solo career has kept his fanbase uneasy, never knowing exactly what to expect from each subsequent release and always hoping for the great, classic album that he's so often shown the potential to record. It's telling that Cold Roses is most disarming to one of Adams' long-time fans for being very, very good.
Album Specs: Cold Roses, Ryan Adams & The Cardinals.
Lost Highway, 000434302.
05/11/2005.
All songs by Ryan Adams, J.P. Bowersock, Cindy Cashdollar, Brad Pemberton, and Catherine Popper. Rachel "Vanessa Carlton, But Good" Yamagata plays piano and sings harmony on "Let It Ride," "Cold Roses," and "Friends."
Disc One:
01. "Magnolia Mountain," 5:52.
02. "Sweet Illusions," 5:02.
03. "Meadowlake Street," 4:28.
04. "When Will You Come Back Home," 4:52.
05. "Beautiful Sorta," 3:01.
06. "Now That You're Gone," 3:51.
07. "Cherry Lane," 4:31.
08. "Mockingbird," 4:47.
09. "How Do You Keep Love Alive," 3:12.
Disc Two:
01. "Easy Plateau," 5:11.
02. "Let it Ride," 3:23.
03. "Rosebud," 2:55.
04. "Cold Roses," 4:36.
05. "If I Am A Stranger," 4:38.
06. "Dance All Night," 3:15.
07. "Blossom," 3:15.
08. "Life is Beautiful," 4:28.
09. "Friends," 4:43.
For Fans Of: Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams. Or anyone looking for a better alternative to the likes of Gavin DeGraw, Jack Johnson, John Mayer, and Dave Matthews.
Cold Roses is the first of three Ryan Adams releases this year on Lost Highway Records. The new release, a double CD, features Ryan s new band The Car...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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